‘It was more insanity than courage’: Arpita Das on what made her start Yoda Press twenty years ago

Arpita Das was 30 when she founded Yoda Press with Parul Nayyar. A career in trade publishing had started to feel restricting and this seemed to be the next – and the right – thing to do. In the initial days, the “office” was a friend’s grandmother’s terrace flat, and the logo was designed by another friend. Soon, Yoda Press started to publish “edgy” writings, which Das says has evolved with the times by keeping their ears to the “ground”. It was important for the list to not be static, lest the big publishers caught on to it and moved in quickly to capture ground.

In the two decades since its inception, Das and her team have published books on queerness- and gender-related themes, the Covid-19 pandemic, citizen’s rights, and other pressing issues. They have also championed fiction in English and in translation. Their graphic narratives have always sold well and readers are hungry for more. Still, publishing is a difficult business and the fight to survive is constant and difficult – expenses must not pile up, the lists must be carefully curated, and, most important, authors must feel cherished for their work. Over the years, Das has worked had to strike the right balance between her ideals and the demands of the market.

In a conversation with Scroll, Das talked about Yoda Press turning twenty, publishing writings that matter, how they survived the Covid-19 pandemic, and the joys of being in the book business.

You were very young when you started Yoda Press twenty years ago. How did you find the courage to start a new press when the Big Five [HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers] were already big in India? And why did you want to do it?
In fact, the Big Five were not yet in India. Well, the Big Three were: Penguin, HarperCollins (my first publishing job was with them back in 1998), and Pan Macmillan. But Random House and Bloomsbury came later. In some ways, it was more insanity than courage, I suppose, that spurs you on to take a step like starting your own publishing house when you are all of 30. But there was also a feeling of being compelled since I felt so circumscribed at my last publishing job before starting Yoda Press, and at a time when I was literally brimming with ideas, and so much was happening, changing around me. It had to be addressed, both what was going on in my mind in terms of new perspectives, as well as what surrounded me; it was in the air I was breathing.

Tell us about the first steps you took after deciding to start a press. You know, designing a logo, finding an office, putting together a team, convincing bookshops to partner with you…
My close friend from college, Oroon Das, a brilliant graphic designer and theatre person, came up with the logo which has been admired so much over these two decades. He knew I loved elephants and punctuation marks, and he did something magical using these two ideas.

My co-founder at the time, Parul Nayyar, who left the partnership after we turned four, had access to a terrace flat in Connaught Place which had been leased to her grandmother in perpetuity; that became our first very Dickensian office. For about two years, it was just the two of us; we could not afford to hire anyone else. We hired our first assistant editor in 2007, I think – the talented Odissi dancer, Supriya Nayak, who worked with Yoda Press for the next five years. She set the bar very high for all future hires.

Getting bookshops to keep our books was hard at first, but there were some who immediately saw us as an edgy young publisher in town, and that helped. They continue to stock our books till today.

Traditionally, publishing is not where the money is. Independent publishers know this especially well. It’s not easy to keep a publishing house alive for so many years. How did you manage the finances? And what are some of the prudent economic decisions one has to make to stay in this business?
That’s a great question. We had to think on our feet constantly, and in some ways, reinvent ourselves continuously. First of all, we knew that our list could not remain static. It had to keep evolving with the times, which meant keeping our ears to the ground. This was not just important because times change and so do focal points of interest as far as one’s readership is concerned; it was also because the minute we popularised a particular genre or list, we knew the big houses would move in. So, we had to remain on our toes and on the cutting edge in terms of where a new niche list could emerge.

Apart from this, in order to take on board the more pragmatic need of running an office in an industry where returns are small and slow to come in, from the beginning itself we did a lot of turnkey publishing work for the development sector. We still do this, in fact, but as our reputation grew, organisations wanted our branding on the cover as well, so they ceased to be simply turnkey assignments.

During the pandemic, we probably faced the most critical situation in terms of survival since revenues from book sales dried up overnight. This time we started online publishing-facing workshops for aspiring writers and they kept us in business till things started up again. Of course, the workshops became so very successful that we have kept them going till now.

You’ve not shied away from publishing really daring, provocative works of both fiction and nonfiction. How do you choose what to publish?
What sets our pulse racing and our temple throbbing either with the intensity of the voice or the compelling nature of the idea in the narrative, is the excitement we look for. A lot of what we publish makes us very angry when we first read it, despairing even, and often also humbles us into greater awareness.

Any publisher would agree that the author is their biggest asset. As a small publisher, how do you find your authors? And how do you build a happy, fruitful relationship with them?
For us, it is the book we publish for the author that is our most vital asset. At first, we went to authors to try and interest them to publish in a fairly new genre for that time, narrative non-fiction, with a young, edgy but unknown press. With time, however, we found writers making their way to us with work that they feel was too edgy for others, or work that would instantly engage our interest.

Running a small press means there is a lot we cannot offer our authors that the big houses can. But what we can offer them is utter submersion in their work and one hundred per cent engagement while making the book and getting the word out and about after making the book. Many of our authors appreciate this and return to us despite there being other shortfalls in our engagement because we are so small.

It’s praiseworthy that Yoda Press identifies itself as a “queer-affirmative and feminist publisher.” Was this always how you had envisioned the brand to be or did you develop this vision over time? Additionally, why was it important for you to publish queer voices, including so many from the margins?
This was very much the vision when we started in 2004: we began with the clear intention to have a list, the first one of its kind in South Asia, which only focused on LGBTQIA+ writings. The vision became more intersectional as we went along, as we learnt more, so it gathered greater nuance over time, but it was there from the beginning.

Queerness, first and foremost, was a personal experience for me; I had been in a serious relationship with someone identifying as queer while I was in college; there were also many queer-identifying friends who were writing about their experiences and sharing their reflections about the politics of being queer in India, but did not have any space to publish these except a fledgling online space dominated by blogging.

I was reading Alan Hollinghurst and Jeanette Winterson and aching to publish similar writing in India. The publishing house I was working in, at that time, had no interest in this subject. For me, however, it made sense that queer writing should be first available in the narrative non-fiction genre, and the more I discussed this with activist writers such as Gautam Bhan, Arvind Narrain, Maya Sharma, Pramada Menon, the more certain I became of this resolve. Speaking with people like Maya also made it clear to me that if we did not talk about the perspectives of lesbians living in tier 2 and 3 cities, or trans peoples’ perspectives, then we would remain in the same urban, upper-class, elite trap that all Indian writing in English tends to flirt with. I did not want this for Yoda Press.

In the past few years, Yoda Press has collaborated with Simon and Schuster on several books. Could you tell us why you chose Simon and Schuster? What has the experience been like?
Well, our first collaboration was, in fact, with the academic press, Sage Publishing, for our more scholarly titles. This collaboration lasted eight years. Around 2019, Rahul Srivastava, who heads Simon and Schuster India, and is an old friend of mine, had a chat with me. He liked our list and wanted to distribute our more trade-y titles. I suggested a collaboration via a joint imprint instead, akin to the one we had with Sage at the time. He liked the idea. The experience has been nothing short of marvellous. There is tremendous mutual respect and even camaraderie between the two teams, and it has made me believe that there is genuine collaboration possible between big and small entities.

Lots of graphic narratives in your catalogue too. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it is one of those genres that struggle to sell in India. Do you think that is changing and what do you think are some of the emerging trends here?
As a matter of fact, they are the fastest to sell in India! So much so, that we cannot keep enough copies in print to meet the demand! We have only scratched the surface as far as graphic narratives are concerned, and there is so much more to do, now that technology allows us to experiment more with the medium. What we did very successfully at Yoda Press was popularise the non-fiction graphic narrative genre in India: there had been a couple of successful anthologies of the kind published by others, but we went hammer and tongs with ours. Short non-fiction graphic narratives are all the rage now, especially online.

I know this is a very difficult question to answer, but as a publisher, what are some of the favourite titles you published? Books that you are really proud of.
Because I Have A Voice: Queer Politics in India, edited by Arvind Narrai and Gautam Bhan and Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India, authored by Maya Sharma are the first ones I shall mention – we did something seriously radical when we published these two books. Both titles were cited in the historic Supreme Court verdict in 2018 reading down Article 377.

This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition, edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh is another one which makes me super proud. Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Retelling authored by Ita Mehrotra, which we managed to publish on the anniversary of the historic protest will always be memorable. Another graphic book I can never ever stop feeling proud of is Inquilab Zindabad: A Graphic Biography of Bhagat Singh, authored by Ikroop Sandhu. Bhaswati Ghosh’s sublime novel, Victory Colony 1950 makes me smile every time I think of it. Being able to publish Gurram Jashuva’s Dalit epic in Telugu verse Gabbilam, translated into English by the lovely Chinnaiah Jangam, which won the 2024 AK Ramanujan Prize for Translation, fills me with immense pride. And finally, K Vaishali’s memoir Homeless: Growing up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India, which won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in July this year makes me believe that we continue to remain relevant.

And finally, how does a publishing brand stay true to itself in this age of confusion?
I think it was fairly confusing when I was young: liberalisation had just happened; we were tripping on Star TV and MTV and aching to do something different even though we were still in the grips of the colonial hangover our parents had passed on to us. Things are much clearer now, I feel there is more nuanced discourse and vocabulary; the UG students I teach [she is a Visiting Faculty of Creative Writing, Ashoka University] and the Millennials and Gen-Z readers of Yoda Press titles are politically aware and unafraid to flag embarrassing bigotries that we were too unsure to do. I find this is the best time for what Yoda Press has always stood for. We are finally being clearly seen for what we are.

At the same time, and as I mentioned before, the house has to evolve in keeping with the vocabulary of the times. And it would be supremely arrogant of me to assume that I am best placed to fully be in touch with all the changes taking place all around us. It’s for this reason that recently, Yoda Press made an important structural change in keeping with its feminist beliefs – my feisty colleague of eight years, Ishita Gupta, has joined me in partnership to run the Press from now on. Staying true to oneself needs courage which, I hope, Yoda Press has in volumes.